At Transcom, our approach in Process Analytics and Improvement involve a series of actions that aim to identify, analyze and improve existing business processes within our partners’ organization, in order to meet new goals and objectives, such as increasing profits and performance, reducing costs and accelerating business value proposition.

We would like to share a case study in this section, where we demonstrate our capabilities in this area via a project completed for one of our partners in the consumer electronics industry.

Our primary task was focused on the mapping, documentation, and analysis of current-state business processes. This led to the discovery of improvement opportunities surrounding organizational alignment, as well as opportunities related to the effective education and communication of agreed business objectives.

In the figure shown below, we provide a summary of identified ‘pain points´ experienced both by our partners’ customers, and our employees who support them in their journey to issue resolution.

Both process mapping and documentation activities were completed, and upon seeing the misalignment on overall process information and business objectives, we provided recommendations which were approved and signed off by our partner.

But the benefits we achieved went far beyond organizational alignment. We have, in fact achieved more in relation to successfully meeting our performance metrics, as well as demonstrating value add to our partner, through cost optimization.

Transcom Netherlands has achieved the prestigious COPC certification for the second year in a row. The COPC standard is an internationally applied control model aimed at handling customer contact. The standard has stringent requirements for customer satisfaction, quality and processes and is focused on high performance.

A COPC certificate is valid for one year. To qualify for recertification, the organisation needs to achieve and sustain continuous performance improvement. The COPC certificate proves that Transcom is able to provide outstanding customer service, with emphasis on customer satisfaction, cost reduction and employee satisfaction that meets the highest international standards.

Transcom Spain has begun working with a leading supplier of online and offline customized marketing and advertising solutions.

The contract covers the following inbound, outbound and back office services:

B2B market customer care (freelancers and SMEs): queries about contracting, billing and collections, publication of advertisements, distribution, web and online product management, claims and complaints and general information. This service is also provided to the company’s commercial network.

Customer loyalty: welcome, presentation of statistics and new products.

Advice and customer support services during the production of digital projects and content (web, social networks, etc.)

These services are delivered from one of our sites in Madrid, by a team of 30 specialist agents.

The goal of the project is to provide assistance for our client’s digital transformation process. Going forward, Transcom will also deliver services within advertising control and other online services.

Imagine you’re shopping on a global ecommerce website, browsing and adding items to your cart. Whether you are buying an exotic holiday, a fashionable pair of shoes or just a blender, you might need some kind of support or additional info at some stage of the buying process. You search all over the website looking for an answer, but can’t find customer resources written in your language or a local number to call for help. Feeling frustrated, you exit the tab and seek out alternatives.

Not only is this a common problem for international shoppers, but it’s also an issue for businesses looking to expand overseas. Without proper ways to communicate with your international customers, it’s difficult to grow global sales or repeat business.

Through a number of specialized contact centers, Transcom can provide quality multilingual customer support in 33 languages and meet the needs of global market leaders as well as those of emerging brands willing to expand into new territories.

Belgrade, Budapest, Gdansk, Lisbon, Riga…: these are just some of the cities where we have developed Transcom multilingual hubs. These cities offer excellent infrastructures, a stable political and social situation, high levels of schooling and professionalism among the population, and widespread familiarity with foreign languages.

Several global companies have already chosen Transcom as strategic partner to offer their international customers the best assistance in their native language. Partnering with a single experienced business process outsourcer, capable to set up a pan-European contact center to support all customers of any nationality implies significant advantages:

consistent (high) level of customer experience provided to all users, based on common business processes, proven training and quality monitoring methods, shared best practices across all operations;

unique point of contact for managing customer care activities in multiple countries;

It is a fact that a company is only as good as its ability to retain its employees, and phenomenal visions are irrelevant without phenomenal people, right? It is up to the management and HR team to carry this responsibility on their shoulders, e.g. through various onboarding programs.

When it comes to new hires, there is no time for a second impression; if a new employee feels bad, in discord with the values and mission of the company, if he/she comes across chaos and unstructured processes, it is unlikely that they will form a favorable view of their new business environment.

Why is it important to constantly improve onboarding programs? The answer is quite straightforward, if we just look at the statistics and the latest research on this topic:

91% employees remain in the company when the organization has an efficient onboarding process;

69% of new employees remain in the company for at least 3 years when the organization has a well-structured onboarding program.

(Source Aberdeen Group)

Although many companies refer to human resources as their most important asset, many organizations continue to invest only minimal efforts on onboarding. Bearing all this in mind, guided by the vision that human resources are not only part of the business, but the main drivers of the entire business, Transcom Serbia has decided to take additional step in this direction. A few months ago, as Country Manager of Transcom Serbia, I started to organize breakfast meetings for new employees. All those who became part of the Transcom team in the last months have been invited to share their first impressions of their new job with me.

In a friendly atmosphere, new colleagues presented themselves in a completely informal and authentic way, exchanging first impressions about their work environment. After their introduction, I briefed them about the birth and growth of Transcom in Serbia, providing an overview of the company’s history. I conveyed the mission and vision of the company, and stressed the need for strong teamwork and team spirit as a key requirement for companies and individuals to succeed.

We can have the best strategy, but if we do not get feedback from the people who work with us, and have a will to improve things based on this, it is impossible for any strategy to take off.

The millennials’ motto of “anytime, anywhere availability” is putting unprecedented demands on companies to deliver instant support around the clock. This means customer service companies need a new strategy to make sure those demands are met.

The key is to be proactive rather than reactive, to deal with customers across digital channels, and to make maximum use of new automation tools that can ease the burden on human agents. E-commerce companies must have a clear strategy for how to use digital channels such as chat, instant messaging and social media. In more traditional sectors, voice is still an important channel. But the millennials who shop online prefer to engage with companies across digital channels rather than over the phone. This means we need to change our traditional approach – putting the right human agents in front of our clients – to a more technological and digitalized approach.

The global turnover for the e-commerce industry is expected to increase from the current EUR 2,520 billion to EUR 5,230 billion by 2020. This makes it an increasingly important sector for the customer care industry, but also one that poses unique challenges. Traditional retail businesses only needed to offer customer services during normal business hours, when their stores were open. But since online stores never close, a support team must be available around the clock. The only way to handle that on a reasonable budget is to define a best-in-place self-service capability with automated technologies such as virtual customer assistants and robotic process automation tools that can provide a first level of support without human intervention.

Services have to be available 24 hours a day, and if you only have human support, it’s very expensive and companies cannot afford it. So they need to find the right balance between human and digital interaction with their customers.

This means customers will interact increasingly with virtual agents in the future (automated services using artificial intelligence to answer simple and frequently asked questions), and proactive support will be offered when an error is detected.

Transcom is constantly working to find the best industry-specific ways of using these new technologies. We appreciate that the same technology will be used in different ways in the banking, e-commerce and telecom industries, for example.

Even though an increasing number of interactions will become automated as time goes by, the individual customer service agent will still play a crucial role, even for e-commerce companies. The difference is that they will manage more complex tasks, working across multiple channels in the future, instead of specializing in just one.

In the past, the agent concentrated on just one channel. But we are moving forward with the ‘smart agent’ who, with the digital revolution, will need to have skills to handle everything from voice to chat, to e-mail, to instant messaging. In some cases, this will mean offering them more sophisticated training in the technologies available, and we are currently testing ways of improving things like agent motivation, brand advocacy, gamification and new compensation models.